Showing posts with label GM crops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GM crops. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Roundup: Birth Defects Caused By World's Top-Selling Weedkiller, Scientists Say
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| Insecticide Spraying - Wikimedia Commons Image |
Huffington Post
WASHINGTON -- The chemical at the heart of the planet’s most widely used herbicide -- Roundup weedkiller, used in farms and gardens across the U.S. -- is coming under more intense scrutiny following the release of a new report calling for a heightened regulatory response around its use.
Critics have argued for decades that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides used around the globe, poses a serious threat to public health. Industry regulators, however, appear to have consistently overlooked their concerns.
A comprehensive review of existing data released this month by Earth Open Source, an organization that uses open-source collaboration to advance sustainable food production, suggests that industry regulators in Europe have known for years that glyphosate, originally introduced by American agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in 1976, causes birth defects in the embryos of laboratory animals.
Read Full Article
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Protesters destroy controversial GMO field trial
Food First
In Wetteren, a municipality in the Belgian province of East Flanders, activists succeeded in damaging the GM potatoes being trialled for blight resistance, despite a large contingent of police officers who had been ordered to guard the GM trial. The officers were unable to stop the 300-400 or more peaceful protesters of all ages, who included local people.
During the protest organized by the Belgian Field Liberation Movement (FLM) - an informal collective consisting of farmers, scientists, consumers, and environmental activists, protesters climbed over a high fence and pulled up GM potato plants. The trial was also allegedly sprayed with herbicide. Some 40 people were arrested.
The non-violent direct action had been announced in advance with the FLM saying they planned to remove the GM potatoes and replant the field with non-GM blight resistant potatoes in a peaceful and public manner.
A sympathetic farmer was quoted as saying, "They [the GM lobby] talk a lot about farmers, but we are never heard. This type of action strengthens us and seems like the only way forward for consumers and small producers who are independent of powerful interest groups like big agribusiness."
In Wetteren, a municipality in the Belgian province of East Flanders, activists succeeded in damaging the GM potatoes being trialled for blight resistance, despite a large contingent of police officers who had been ordered to guard the GM trial. The officers were unable to stop the 300-400 or more peaceful protesters of all ages, who included local people.
During the protest organized by the Belgian Field Liberation Movement (FLM) - an informal collective consisting of farmers, scientists, consumers, and environmental activists, protesters climbed over a high fence and pulled up GM potato plants. The trial was also allegedly sprayed with herbicide. Some 40 people were arrested.
The non-violent direct action had been announced in advance with the FLM saying they planned to remove the GM potatoes and replant the field with non-GM blight resistant potatoes in a peaceful and public manner.
A sympathetic farmer was quoted as saying, "They [the GM lobby] talk a lot about farmers, but we are never heard. This type of action strengthens us and seems like the only way forward for consumers and small producers who are independent of powerful interest groups like big agribusiness."
Friday, May 20, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
More problems with glyphosate: Rice growers sound alarm
Activist Post
Adding to the natural rice industry’s woes after Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply with transgenic rice in 2006, the widespread application of Bayer’s glufosinate and Monsanto’s glyphosate is reducing crop yields, and burning and deforming rice plants that survive. [Image: Glyphosate deforms the growing points on rice plants.]
The Mississippi Rice Council (MRC) has sounded a national alarm over damage caused by aerial drift of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, calling for severely restricted aerial application.
MRC president Mike Wagner recently told crop dusters at this year’s Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association annual meeting that glyphosate is wreaking havoc on the natural rice industry where “non-transgenic rice is planted in a sea of genetically modified crops that are tolerant to glyphosate.”
Wagner reported that, “Rice specialists noticed that rice that had no obvious damage through the growing season would yield and mill poorly and would exhibit the classic trait associated with late glyphosate drift — the kernel would be shaped like a parrot beak instead of its normally elongated, symmetrical shape.”
[Image: Glyphosate causes rice to deform from a cylinder into a parrot beak shape.]Field studies run in 2007 and 2008 by the University of Arkansas showed reduced rice yield by up to 80% from glyphosate, as well as glufosinate, an herbicide produced by Bayer. On top of reduced yield, both herbicides burned the leaves and stunted the growth of rice plants.
In December, the MRC unanimously recommended an annual cutoff date of June 1 for its aerial application, when yield potential for rice is determined.
“Damage occurring at this time does not allow for an alternate crop to be replanted. Consequently, the farmer has two nooses around his neck: (1) he is stuck with a crop that will generate lower revenues, and (2) he has already incurred nearly all expenses that are associated with that crop,” said Wagner.
Because those expenses range from $650 to $900 per acre, “One can see that any losses can be staggering. This is a losing proposition for our rice industry, and one that continues to occur. Our alarm is warranted.”
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Saturday, December 18, 2010
CDC revises estimates of foodborne illness; still an inflated scare tactic
Activist Post
After author Ben Hewitt revealed that the oft-quoted figure of 77 million foodborne illnesses a year came from a 1999 study based mostly on assumption, the Centers for Disease Control released a revised estimate of 48 million. The new revision still uses the assumption, which Hewitt clarifies:
It is less often stated that the 1999 study providing these numbers ends with a line that reads ‘unknown agents account for approximately 81% of foodborne illnesses and hospitalizations and 64% of deaths.’ In other words, a significant majority of assumed illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths are just that: Assumed. The numbers are merely extrapolated from estimates of all deaths by gastroenteritis of unknown cause.
The remaining 38 million illnesses result from unspecified agents, which include known agents without enough data to make specific estimates, agents not yet recognized as causing foodborne illness, and agents not yet discovered.
Paul Blake of The Herb Prof says, “They have now entered the world of the anecdotal — the very place that they accused the naturopaths of going.”
Instead of 5,000 annual deaths, now the CDC says 3,000 people die from foodborne pathogens a year. Instead of 325,000 annual hospitalizations, there are now 128,000. But don’t compare those numbers, they warn, because the data collection techniques are different. They made fewer assumptions.
Frankly, I don’t believe 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from tainted food. We would hear about it; we would personally know people — probably within our own families — who become wedded to the toilet. The latest CDC revision on its face doesn’t comport with reality. It is merely a scare tactic used to support federal seizure of the food supply.
In the same press release, the CDC urges Congress to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) which will vastly expand the powers of the Food & Drug Administration, because, after all, every single foodborne pathogen related illness or death is preventable. (Yeah, it’s called immunity, which humans develop after being exposed — no need for government interference in the laws of nature.)
As an update, the Food Safety Modernization Act was included in the Senate omnibus spending bill, which was rejected on Thursday without a vote, given vast opposition to the 2,000-page bill. This means the food bill will not likely be passed this year, unless the Senate includes it in the short term Continuing Resolution now being finalized. Folks are encouraged to call their Senators to oppose adding the food safety bill to the new CR, which will be passed by midnight Saturday.
Meanwhile, the CDC does not address the 106,000 deaths caused annually (as of 1998) by drugs approved by the FDA. Neither the CDC nor the FDA want to discuss the number of “iatrogenic” deaths – those deaths caused by doctor error or by treatments prescribed by a doctor. In 1997, that amounted to 420,000 deaths, according to Dr. Lucian L. Leape (discussed by Dr Gary Null, et al.).
Can you imagine the hullabaloo if farmer “error” caused 420,000 deaths each year?
If the FDA were truly concerned with public safety, it would go after drugs and doctors. It would not be raiding natural food producers and distributors. It would have shut down Wright County Egg, which sickened over 1,600 people at last count, instead of shutting down Morningland Dairy, whose product sickened no one. FDA concerns could not be more transparent if they sported a Monsanto logo.
Likewise, the Food Safety Modernization Act is not about safety – it is intended to wipe out mid-size food producers thru overly burdensome regulations, excessive fees and fines, and by interfering with the normal conduct of business — all for the benefit of the multinational corporations whose former executives and lawyers sit at the federal government level.
During the Senate debate on S.510, we repeatedly heard from both sides that “the United States has the safest food supply in the world.” Perhaps S.510 proponents never heard the folk wisdom, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
This food bill is about destroying competition of the food giants. It will expand monopoly control over our food supply. It extends federal reach beyond what is permitted under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution by seeking to regulate intrastate commerce. It will destroy local food economies. It is an attack on the personal freedom of humanity to feed itself natural, unadulterated foods outside the irradiated, chlorinated, drugged and pesticide-laden food system that already dominates us.
Not only is the Food Safety Modernization Act unconstitutional, it is unconscionable.
Rady Ananda’s work has appeared in several online and print publications. She holds a B.S. in Natural Resources from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture. Using years of editorial experience and web publishing, Rady now promotes the ideas and work of a select group of quality writers and artists at Food Freedom and COTO Report.
Related Article by Rady Ananda:
New Scientist Magazine Plants False Story That Pope Approves GM Crops
Leaked Cables Confirm Pope's Distance From GMO Debate
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Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Leaked Cable: Hike food prices to boost GM crop approval in Europe
Activist Post
In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cablereleased by WikiLeaks.
During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”
It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.
The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.
All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.
Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.
In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:
This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.
The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:
- One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, whichRichard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”
- In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.
- According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GM Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.
- In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my Dec. 12 piece, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”)
Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation
Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.
Mother Jones describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:
As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….
Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.
After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 thru the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:
They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.
Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion. The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.
The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades. Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:
The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million. The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…
Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?
No, in fact ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”
A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:
* In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.
* The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.
* At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.
* However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.
* Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.
* In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.
* In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.
Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009
Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere. Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:
In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”
Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes. But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejectedMonsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds. However, the big push remains in Africa and China.
A Wary Future
Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.
Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger. This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: There is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.
Rady Ananda’s work has appeared in several online and print publications. She holds a B.S. in Natural Resources from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture. Using years of editorial experience and web publishing, Rady now promotes the ideas and work of a select group of quality writers and artists at Food Freedom and COTO Report.
Related Article by Rady Ananda:
New Scientist Magazine Plants False Story That Pope Approves GM Crops
Leaked Cables Confirm Pope's Distance From GMO Debate
RELATED ARTICLE:
Banksters Inflate Speculative Food Bubble
Buy 1 Get 2 Free at Botanic Choice Buy 1 Bottle and Get 2 FREE (select items), plus Free Shipping on $25+ Expires 12/31/2010
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)Live Superfoods
It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!Print this page
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